Use the topic and thesis of your paper to work through the different sections of an APA paper. There are no specific guidelines for the title page, and often it is not required, but if necessary, the title of your paper should be centered, with the topic in the upper right-hand corner. List your name, course, professor and date at the bottom of the title page.
Write a short overview or summary of the topic, focusing on your key points, for the abstract page. Center the word abstract at the top of the page. Both the title page and abstract page require lower case roman numerals (i and ii) in the upper right-hand corner.
Center the full title of your paper on the first page of your paper. Introduce the thesis and organize your thoughts and research in logical order. Write in the past or present perfect tense (argued, has argued). Number the body of your paper with Arabic numerals in the upper right-hand corner, and include the topic on every page to the left of the page number.
Create a new page for any tables or figures you are using, noting the source and giving any explanation for the content. Title each visual in order (Table 1, Table 2, Figure 1, Figure 2).
Use the author-date system to cite in-text sources. Introduce the source with a signal phrase, including the last name of the author or authors, immediately following with the date of the source in parentheses. After citing the material, list the page number at the end of the sentence in parentheses.
If you are using an exact sentence or phrase, include quotation marks to avoid plagiarism. Paraphrase sources by writing the general idea in your own words. Cite properly for both methods. Integrating facts or statistics can be done without a signal phrase, and at the end of the sentence the author, year and page are all put in parentheses.
Reference all works and authors at the end of the paper in alphabetical order by the author's last name, or title if no author is listed. Always list the author first, followed in parentheses by the publication year. List the title of the work next, italics for books and quotation marks for shorter pieces like articles. List the location of the publication and publisher. Electronic sources require the entire URL. Find all the information for a source possible. The first line of a reference is not indented, but if the information continues into more than one line, each line after that needs to be indented.